Ozone in indoor environments can pose a health risk to human occupants; around half of exposure to this pollutant occurs inside buildings. One approach to reducing indoor O3 levels is to mitigate O3 as it enters a building via outdoor air ventilation supply. Often, mechanical systems that introduce outdoor air into buildings are placed on building rooftops. At the urban scale, greenery has been shown to reduce levels of some harmful pollutants, including ozone and cities like Portland, OR, are mandating green roofs be built on large commercial buildings to increase urban green surfaces. We investigate if rooftop vegetation may act as a sink for O3 as transport occurs across a green roof. It is known that O3 can react with vegetated surfaces and the ground but there is scant empirical research on said pollutant dynamics on vegetated green roofs, and little data concerning pollutant interactions occurring on other rooftop designs. Essentially unstudied is the potential of rooftop designs to affect local concentrations of pollutants where building outdoor air supply may be co-located. In this study, we investigate O3 dry deposition using resistance uptake theory in an area that includes a green roof on a local big box retail store through a field study conducted during a two-week period in the Summer of 2017. Deposition velocities and subsequently surface resistances were measured. The 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles for resistances were 54.8 s/m, 195.3 s/m, and 3692.9 s/m respectively. A 2-D advection-diffusion model of rooftop deposition is employed to describe transport across the green roof and sensitivity analysis was performed to compare the impact of different parameters. The sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the fetch length and the vegetation height had the biggest impact, followed by the meteorological parameters; the friction velocity and heat flux. The surface resistance had the least impact on deposition. An ideal case was used to demonstrate that even when conditions are maximized for deposition, the impact on the concentration gradient is minimal at best.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-5624 |
| Date | 27 September 2018 |
| Creators | Ramasubramanian, Pradeep |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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